Circa 2008 it's well understood that 'Fields of the Nephilim' means Carl McCoy plus nameless backing musicians. It's also equally accepted by all but the most ardent of adorers that Carl McCoy is a little on the self-important side, especially when it comes to the legacy of the Neph. He may be able to claim legal and spiritual woo-woo ownership of the major themes and conceptual underpinnings of the Nephilim as a b(r)and, but the band's appeal to me was always as much the music as vocals and imagery. So without the Wright bros and Messrs Pettit and Yates, I wasn't expecting too much on the musical front.

Having said that, it was a Neph gig, and Mr Neph himself was going to be up there, belting out the tunes, and I was determined to make the most of it. And the band circa 2008 acquitted themselves well. A little metalesque in places (understandable), but really tight and mostly true to the original sound.

Right, the gig. Shepherd's Bush Empire, the kind of old music-hall-looking venue you'd never see in ZA. All added to the charm, this is the appeal of London. We arrived a little late thanks to half of London's underground network being closed due to suicides, repairs or lack of interest. I thought the tubes got clogged up during weekday rush hours, sheesh.

Huge queues when we arrived, so we went into the Irish pub next door for a few pints. Packed with old-school goth types. Quite noticeably (and refreshingly) different to current-day goths. Fewer piercings but more wrinkles. And nary a patch of PVC. I felt more at home around this odd lot than I've felt around alternatives in many a year.

A few pints and we made our way into the venue. We had seats on the first floor, but chose to stand along the first floor balcony to the left of the stage. Virtually on top of the stage, perfect view, if a little too close to the speaker stacks for an old fart like me. As I mentioned, the atmosphere in the crowd was brilliant. I'm glad I wasn't on the ground floor, it was rather lively and the shirtless dudes moshing and building pyramids looked like they were having a blast, but I might have felt less charitable if I'd been stuck behind them.

Covering band - Inkubus Sukkubus. Or, as it was more accurately put last night: 'hey, this is one of those 90's goth bands' 'yep, I recognise this song from Gothic Rock II', 'yeah, me too, who are they?' 'stuffed if I remember'. They weren't bad but a little too cheezy gawth for me. Never mind that I was paying good money to watch a band whose entire ethos is being dust-covered, trenchcoat-clad post-apocalyptic spaghetti-western cyberpunk cowboys with a thing for Cthulhu and Crowley and Sumerian mythology. It's a subtle distinction, I'll admit.

Impressions and memories...

Flour. Wouldn't have believed it, but a song or so into the gig, you could see flour/powder on the stage floor. That made me chuckle.

McCoy. Well, you see videos, then you see the real person. Ain't the tallest fella in the world. Huge presence, though, leathers, boots, crazy hat, and of course, voice right outta a thousand packs of Camel Plains.

Big-ass septagram on stage. True to theme, I suppose. I think McCoy was taking pains to stand at certain points in the thing during different songs, so maybe he was being all magickal and heavy. At other times he just stomped around in his big boots like he was pished. Maybe a bit of both.

Songs. Not enough of them, sadly... when they went off before the encores I thought it was a half-time intermission. No songs from Dawnrazor, which was disappointing, but a little bit of everything else, including Zoon. A few tracks from the latest material, which didn't blow me away. Best songs for me were Endemoniada and Psychonaut, and the Moonchild encore. The Elizium stuff wasn't far behind - beautiful and haunting as always.

Strange experiences, meeting new people - met a South African dude who was standing next to us, and asked 'how did you guys hear of this band? I only got into them a few months ago, never heard of them in my life before, but they're brilliant'. I'd have felt rather old if the bloke wasn't my age. After the gig they disappeared, I'm sorry I didn't get to chat to him and his missus further, their enthusiasm brought a smile to my face. Made me wonder how many new fans a band like the Neph can still attract - what they sound like to people who don't have the subcultural history or context.

Trip home - we stopped off at the pub next door for a final pint, which wasn't a good idea, because my mate Rhett and I missed the last trains and ended up missioning around outside Victoria station before finding a night bus out to Chislehurst, which went through every dodgy suburb south of the Thames, and picked up lots of yobs who had 'knife crime' written all over their spotty faces. But still, all part of the adventure.

So there you go. I've now seen FoTN live.]]> http://www.thecorneroffice.org/blog/plink/2008/07/080711-2323.html It's July. Cue ohmywordit'shalfwaythroughtheyearalready type comments. Ohmywordit'shalfwaythroughtheyearalready. Hard to believe (I think I say that every year). I look back over the last 6 months and I'm not sure what I've accomplished.

What new technologies have I been working with this year? More Spring, CXF, and a dose of distributed systems type stuff. Good fun - not much that's bloggable, but fun nonetheless. I've finally come to terms with Maven2 and decided it's not bad. When I first started using it, I couldn't think up enough horrible things to say about it, but I've reached the point where I prefer using m2eclipse over traditional Java projects in Eclipse.

At home, I've fluffed around a bit - frustratingly so I'll admit. I wanted to whip up something that would make it easier for me to ply my trading trade in Eve. In the end, the trading app tail wagged the tech hobby dog. I backed-and-forthed and experimented with different things for ages: Eclipse RCP, plain SWT, Swing, web, wxWidgets, and everything between. I finally settled on wxWidgets and C++. I was fiddling with some complicated JFace widget one night and decided there and then that I just wasn't going to waste any more time on Eclipse RCP. Good luck to those who can make it do good things - I just think it's too much effort and frustration. Eclipse is a great IDE, but I've lost all interest in seeing how the sausage is made. Regardless of the flavour, Java GUI programming and I do not get along. I've now made peace with that fact.

That was a month or two back. As I've said before, I like wxWidgets. Its API just feels like it has far less bullshit. GUI toolkits weren't meant to fully occupy the agenda for 2008, but I've wanted to get comfortable with something - comfortable enough to bolt a UI onto whatever itch I'm scratching, so to speak. So I'll carry on with wxWidgets and C++ - 2008 was supposed to be the year I got my hands dirty with C++ again anyway - and then move onto my original planned diversions in a few months' time.

Ironically, the past 2 months have been the busiest on the work and Real Life front, and the going is slow. But at least I have a sense of direction again, and for a stretch I found myself thoroughly depressed at how much time I was wasting when I didn't have that.

So I don't blame the MDC for pulling out of the run-off. It would have been a farce, and the world looks on and tut-tuts and grumbles while Zimbabweans are tortured and murdered. Perhaps by pulling out things might just come to a head.

I'm not sure if they will. It's heartening to see some other African countries speaking up. It just makes me more ashamed to be a South African, though. Our president's 'quiet diplomacy', in newspaper-speak, is a standoffish attempt to respect Zimbabwean sovereignty. In real-person speak, everyone knows it means tacit support of Zanu PF's tyranny. How could it not? As the situation in Zimbabwe deteriorates, South Africa's inaction just changes from tacit to very explicit support.

Ashamed. Our leaders should be speaking truth to power, condemning injustice whatever the source. Instead, the sad old fool in charge of our country makes a mockery of everything South Africa's constitution is supposed to stand for and protect. The world is watching, incredulous at our stance towards our neighbour, and I'm sure a great many people are left wondering what the ANC will be like when its own hold on power is challenged one day. Democracy, indeed.

This evening, wallet icon flickered, money's changed hands. Checked the journal, another happy sale, someone bought one of my Cormorant destroyers. The player's name was distinctive, I remembered it. Let's call him Mr X. A few minutes later, I was warping in, preparing to dock at the station, and who was undocking, but Mr X in his brand new Cormorant. A Cormorant I made. Now it's off with its new owner to take on pirates and bad guys (or good guys) and seek fortune. I felt like sending the dude a message saying 'hey, good luck in my ship'. I decided against it. But it's a pretty cool thought. I'll keep an eye on the books and see how soon before he needs to buy another one :-)

A 1 ton bomb, sitting there for 65-odd years, waiting to go boom. And then, when the bomb squad tries to defuse it, it starts ticking! Crazy.

Young Davey's riding high now, taking cheap shots at Brown, who looks like he's about to burst into tears at any minute (I would if I were him, too), and yet you know that in 10 years' time when everyone's had enough of the Tories and the pendulum's starting to swing again, it'll be some young Labour whippersnapper putting on the theatrics and hamming it up for the cameras.

Awesome.

I wonder why that is. I suspect it has a lot to do with how people work with IDEs. In the old days when crazy people coded Java in Notepad or vi, it might have made sense (and been more convenient) to have multiple classes in the same file (it's common enough in C++ code). With an IDE like Eclipse, and using something like the Package Explorer, files are the top level of abstraction within a package, and I think developers make an easy file = class equivalence.

Arguably, multiple classes in a file allows an extra level of organisation, logically grouping related classes. Whenever I want to do that, though, I favour inner classes. I can scope the classes more tightly, and associations are more explicit. The down side is you can lose some encapsulation. To be honest, I just never think about anything other than class-per-file with inner classes as needed. So is there a place for multiple classes in a file? Is this a useful but much-neglected feature in Java, or does it hurt readability for developers who don't expect to see it? Not sure...

With the font problem, I decided to take the plunge and try Xubuntu. I've fiddled with Xfce once or twice before, never done much more than poke around. This time I think it's for keeps. I'm glad to say that my fonts are displaying as nicely as can be, and I'm much taken by the look and feel. Is it genuinely lighter on memory and CPU than Gnome? I'm not sure, and it doesn't matter that much. It looks good and it feels good (even handling Gtk apps quite gracefully), and I'm chuffed.

Now the job of getting everything set up again...

It's been insanely hot here the past 2 weeks. It's also a little more humid here than the Highveld. Not as bad as KZN, but muggy nonetheless.

What surprised me last week, was how people here get into summer so quickly. I left work last Friday, and the lawns outside the office buildings were packed with people out enjoying the sun. I don't think I ever remember South Africans out en masse on the lawns of office parks during summer. I guess because glorious (yaaay) weather is rarer here, people appreciate it more.

Now some extended rainy spells, please.

What does that mean right now? I don't see this replacing ye olde containers just yet, but it is another indication that OSGi is taking off. As I've said before, I'm somewhat ambivalent about OSGi. It's a powerful way to put together large and complex applications (like IDEs and application servers), but I'm not so sure if the effort is justified when building smaller applications where a few jars and config files will do. So the appeal of things like the SSAP (or whatever the hell it ends up being called) comes down to just how much of the additional drudgery is necessary for business-as-usual apps, and/or how much can be made to go away with good IDE tooling.